Cairo
The Light Mk VI was done for. They had limped into GHQ late in the afternoon and the engine had blown up. They had rescued their kit, saluted the old girl, given her an affectionate pat on the turret and abandoned her to her fate. No one had seemed to mind or to question it. The roads leading into Cairo were littered with abandoned military hardware that no one had the inclination or the time to salvage. Gerald had made his report to Cathcart, his CO, and Cathcart had seemed supremely uninterested and given him no further orders. That was fine by Gerald. He had had a long bath, dug out a change of clothes and presented himself at the officers’ mess, where he proceeded to drink large quantities of pink gin in the company of an adjutant from the Royal Rifle Corps and a captain from the Argylls.
The mess swirled about him disconcertingly in a pungent fug of Turkish cigarettes and Turkish coffee. Before the war the place had been the bar of a lavish turn-of-the-century European hotel that in daylight hours afforded magnificent views over a sweeping terrace, a polo field and a croquet lawn down to the banks of the Nile. Now the blackout blinds and stuttering hurricane lamps threw the interior, crowded with wicker chairs and tables and potted palms, into flickering relief. A radio tuned to Egyptian State Broadcasting idly played light music in the background and a copy of a week-old Egyptian Gazette lay discarded on the table before them. Six months ago, a year ago, the whole place had been teeming with South Africans, Greeks, Maltese, Cypriots, Czechs, Poles, Australians, New Zealanders—officers from all over the Empire, with sappers and engineers and infantry, with signalmen and airmen and naval commanders, even the top brass, and one had had to fight for a seat and elbow one’s way to the bar. Now the war had moved elsewhere and the place had a neglected, somewhat depressing air to it and the only men left were the wounded, the pen-pushers and the salvage and cleanup boys. The single barman, a bald Egyptian with a drooping moustache and a resigned air, polished glasses and looked bored.
There had been no letters waiting for Gerald upon his return and that had surprised him. So instead he addressed the adjutant who had a letter open before him and who was marginally less drunk than the captain from the Argylls.
‘What’s the news from home?’
‘My wife’s left me,’ said the adjutant, a large man with a clipped moustache and rapidly blinking eyes. He reached unsteadily for a cigarette and swore when it dropped to the floor.
‘I say, I’m most dreadfully sorry, old boy,’ said Gerald, who had only met the fellow an hour before and had already forgotten his name. He gave the man one of his own cigarettes and lit it for him. ‘Jolly nasty for you.’
‘Ran off with a Yank!’ the man said, sitting up and becoming bellicose. ‘Bloody little tart! He’s welcome to her.’
‘Aye. You’re well shot of her, mon,’ said the captain, a Glaswegian with an almost impenetrable accent and a florid complexion, his eyes half closed by alcohol. It was not clear to Gerald if these two already knew each other and if the captain in the Argylls was therefore in a positon to make an informed observation about the adjutant’s wife or was merely drunk. ‘They’re all bloody tarts!’ the man added, addressing his tumbler of gin morosely.
‘Not all, surely,’ said Gerald. ‘My wife—’
He paused, not quite certain what he had been going to say. He wished them to understand that his wife was not a tart, but he could not quite bring himself to utter the word in the same sentence. It felt wrong, thinking of Diana in the same breath as a tart. It defiled her, somehow. It defiled him.
‘My wife is a good woman,’ he said finally, and because it was the truth.
‘You’re a lucky man,’ said the Scot darkly, as though he found something sinister in Gerald’s assertion.
‘Bloody little tart,’ said the adjutant and, to their horror, he began to weep silently.
They got the poor chap back to his quarters and the Scot wandered off to the brothels in Clot Bey to find a tart of his own, leaving Gerald to kill the remainder of his evening alone. Having no wish to spend it in the company of other morose or belligerent fellow officers, he wandered past the commandeered Semiramis Hotel and the closed and blacked-out palaces and government offices in Midan Ismail and down towards the riverside.
The air had a different quality here away from the desert, having an almost tangible viscosity that made one’s flesh clammy to the touch. The flies were gone but in their place angry mosquitos buzzed, and crickets, frogs—or at any rate some unidentifiable form of wildlife—croaked and sang and chirped loudly and relentlessly the closer one got to the river. Wide, graceful steps led down to the water at this point, framed by a regal line of palm trees, and he imagined that, in another era, white-suited colonial officials and their wives would have paraded, liveried man servants scurrying a step behind wielding elegant white parasols. Now the few people one met were government officials in battered panama hats or the girls sitting smoking outside the brothels or locals in their long white tunics peddling, for a few piasters, whatever came to hand and who regarded one with suspicion if not open hostility. The European hotels along the water’s edge that had all been requisitioned during the desert war had, for the most part, been decommissioned but were sadly knocked about, an echo of their former selves showing keenly the effects of four years of military occupation and enemy air strikes. Still, it was safer here in the European part of the city. He had an idea if he strayed too far he’d end up as a corpse floating in the river. He had been here in ’42 when Rommel had been a mere two hours away and the local traders, in anticipation of his arrival, had displayed Rommel Wilkommen signs in their shop windows.
He had reached the river’s edge and he paused. Small naval craft were moored to a pontoon along with a scattering of merchant vessels and the smaller, rickety craft favoured by the locals. The water lapped gently, a crust of detritus washing against the bulwark. Moonlight shimmered on the water’s surface, illuminating what the blackout tried to obscure, and he could make out the shadows of the bridges that crossed to Gezira, the island that sat squarely in the middle of the river, and on its northern tip Zamalek, where the ex-pats had lived in those far-off days before the war.
There had been no letters waiting for him. He did not fear that his wife would run off with a Yank, for he trusted implicitly in her fidelity and in their marriage. It concerned him that her letters to him had not got through, had perhaps been sunk by enemy action, or that his letters to her had somehow failed to arrive. In his last letter he had taken some time to describe the desert at dawn to her because it had struck him at the time as something beautiful and he had sat on the roof of the Mk VI and tried to put down in words how it had seemed to him. Of course, it was entirely likely the censors had struck the whole lot out as it gave away his location—though what use the enemy would make of it he could not imagine. But the rest of the letter, where he had asked after her and Abigail, about the rationing and the bombing, where he had recalled in vivid detail a tennis match they had attended together before the war, she would have been able to read that part. In that dawn sitting on the roof of the tank he had wanted to write, I am alive! Ashby is dead but I have made it! but he did not write that. Instead he asked about the rationing and recalled a tennis match.
He had taken Diana to Wimbledon once because she had never been. It had been the year the Americans had made a clean sweep of it and they had watched Helen Wills Moody easily account for Elizabeth Ryan in straight sets and Diana had applauded wildly and enthusiastically and he had felt his heart lift. Afterwards they had eaten strawberries and clotted cream out of a bowl with their fingers and he had asked her to marry him. He had had no engagement ring with him, for he had not expected to ask her. It had struck him at the time what a very different thing this was to the thing with Bunny. That had been a voyage, exhilarating and terrifying but tainted by wretchedness and despair and, ultimately, hopelessness. With Diana it was a steady but satisfying climb on a warm August afternoon in the Peak District. Later, when he had located his mother’s engagement ring and presented it to her, she had said, ‘What was your mother’s name?’ And when he had told her she had said, ‘How beautiful, I wish I had met her,’ and, ‘If we are to have a little girl that must be her name.’
They had married at Marylebone Registry Office after a downpour on a cool October morning and when they had emerged as man and wife the pavements had gleamed wetly in the sunlight.
But there had been no little girl, and no little boy. There had been two babies in the early years of their marriage that Diana had lost in the first months of her pregnancy and then nothing. He had been unconcerned at their childlessness, for that appeared to be their fate. Diana had been twenty-five when they had married then, somehow, suddenly, she was thirty-five and he forty and he had felt keenly her growing misery, had assured her it did not matter. But it did matter, dreadfully, to her. It was a sort of craving in her, as if without a child she was unfinished, incomplete. He could not feel the same way but he saw how she suffered and it grieved him.
War had been declared and it seemed to Gerald that his wife had declared her own war, that she had begun rationing, had hidden herself in the deepest shelter, already. The war would make very little difference.
He had been seconded to the Ministry of Supply. It had not occurred to either of them he might be called up for active service. She had fallen pregnant around the turn of the new year, though she had told him nothing until Easter had come and gone. Out of fear, he presumed, that she would lose this one too. His joy had been tempered by fear but Diana had bloomed. He had thought of requesting time off around the birth—the ministry had, at that time, been in a constant and escalating state of panic, every ministry was, but he felt sure they would agree. Then Dunkirk had happened and suddenly he had found himself attached to a tank regiment doing basic training and it had seemed the cruel-lest joke of all, that their child was to come just as he was to be posted overseas.
The baby was born at eight o’clock on a bright autumn morning exactly a year into the war and he had gazed upon this tiny thing they had produced together and had been unable to speak. And he had gazed at his wife and saw, perhaps properly for the first time, the grief she had endured that was, now, in this moment, gone. His indifference to all those childless years seemed to be that of another man, a misguided man who had been unable to imagine such a joyous thing as his own child, in a cot, red-faced and wrinkled and helpless, and a wife exhausted but so proud, so complete. And his imminent departure to fight in a war that Britain was losing on every front had hung heavily over it all, heightening every sense, lengthening and telescoping each moment. He had sworn to return safely to them but his awareness of the utter lack of control he now had over his own destiny had made his words hollow and meaningless.
But I am alive, he said to himself now, on a Cairo evening more than three years later, and the river lapped at his feet, the dock rats scurried along the waterfront and through the night air he could hear, distantly, the girls outside the brothels calling desultorily to passers-by. He had seen his child just that once when she had been a single day old. She was now three years and four months and he had missed one thousand two hundred and fifteen days of her young life. The fact of his absence dismayed him but her existence made every day and every battle worth the price. He thought of the last photograph that Diana had sent him, of three-year-old Abigail, seated stiffly in a chair in a pretty dress, her stubby little legs dangling high above the floor, a hairband pulling her fine dark hair back from her forehead. He had three photographs of her now, and he had peered into his child’s eyes searching for some sign of himself, for some sense of her awareness of him, some comprehension in her eyes that he was the reason she went annually through this ritual. But he saw nothing. Her fingers curled around a ball that the photographer had placed in her lap.
Ashby had had a child too, a little boy called Marcus, and the fact of Marcus was like a pain striking his heart and he felt ashamed at his own feelings of helplessness and loss.
He returned to the barracks, passing through roadblocks and checkpoints, showing his pass to bored MPs who, like everyone, clearly wished they were somewhere else. A pretty young WAC from Cathcart’s staff, in full uniform and smoking a quiet cigarette, was waiting for him with a message to report to Cathcart at once. He smartened himself up, in a perfunctory way, and presented himself at Cathcart’s door to be given the news that he was going home in the morning.
The call to prayer from a dozen minarets sounded distantly across the city’s fading darkness. Not long after, dawn began to glow softly in the eastern sky like the embers of a dying fire, seeping between the slats of the blackout blind, and if Gerald had been asleep it would have woken him. He had not slept. His kitbag was packed, repacked, a dozen times. He heaved it over his shoulder and left, without a backward glance, out to the waiting car, his shirt already soaked through with sweat though the sun had hardly risen.
He travelled in an open staff car with three other officers, the sun now blazing, and the road ahead shimmered and rippled with the heat. A second car followed behind and they drove through the silently deserted streets north-west out of the city and along the Desert Road the hundred or so miles to Alexandria where the airstrip was, for they were going home not by troopship but in an RAF aircraft. With stops for refuelling, they would be home within a day.
They drew up at the airstrip where an aircraft was being readied for take-off, a twin-engine de Havilland Flamingo, a civilian plane originally, battered and worn, and for a moment Gerald’s bewildered joy was tempered at the thought of flying anywhere in that thing. Aircraft in far better condition than this got shot down every day and being a transport carrier was no protection, quite the opposite: they would be a sitting target. Cathcart had said Gerald had only got a seat on the plane because someone else had dropped out at the last moment.
He stowed his kit and climbed wordlessly aboard, still numb from the early start, from the unexpected summons to Cathcart’s office last night, and found a seat. He thought about the navy troopships in the harbour that were still avoiding the U-boats in the Med, still sailing via the Red Sea and the Cape. Going by plane was the difference between many weeks’ voyage and a single day’s journey. He pushed his fear down and out of sight. He strapped himself into his seat and the chap next to him told him that the man whose spot he had taken was an adjutant from the Royal Rifles who had shot himself at the barracks the previous night. The man had not died, he said, but was lying, critical and insensible, in the military hospital in Cairo.
The pilot and the co-pilot were already in the cockpit checking their instruments, a radio operator tucked in behind them. There were nine other passengers on the flight: a couple of doctors from a medical corps, two junior officers and a major all from the Durham Light Infantry, two NCOs from a New Zealand regiment, a captain from Reconnaissance and a South African sapper. One of the lieutenants from the DLI wore a bandage around his head and seemed not to be quite all there. His fellow officer stayed by his side the whole time, explaining everything, though the man seemed not to hear him. His major smoked foul-smelling cigars and ignored them both. The Kiwis and the South African began smoking and playing cards at once. The captain and the two doctors just smoked and looked out of the window or tried to sleep. No one spoke. As the aircraft lurched upwards Gerald felt his stomach tighten sickeningly. The aircraft banked steeply and he grabbed the seat in front of him, seeing the horizon at a crazy angle through the tiny porthole, sea one moment, desert the next. He relaxed his grip and folded his arms before him. He would think of nothing.
They flew west along the coast, covering in a matter of hours the mile after mile of rugged, mine-pocked desert that two armies had fought over for three years and where Ashby had died, coming down briefly in the afternoon to refuel in Tunis, where sandwiches were handed around, and again in Gibraltar, where blankets were distributed. After this they turned north, flying through the night over neutral Portugal and the Bay of Biscay, meeting no enemy aircraft but buffeted mercilessly by a fierce headwind, landing at RAF Exeter with ice on their wings in the frozen pre-dawn.
Someone on the ground yanked the door open and pulled down the steps and they climbed stiffly down from the aircraft and stood, like dazed animals, in the cold air, too stunned even to flap their arms or blow on their numbed fingers. Their bodies, which for years had sweated and laboured beneath a desert sun, went into shock—all except the captain from Recon, who had remained silent and sullen throughout the journey, and now fell to his knees and wept. No one said anything or even appeared particularly surprised but Gerald swallowed a lump in his throat and the de Havilland, the airstrip, the huts at the edge of the airstrip, blurred before his eyes. He looked upwards into a sky that was thick with impenetrable grey cloud, an English sky, and his eyes filled with tears.
They shuffled in a ragged, bewildered group towards the huts, where a red-faced woman with a streaming cold in a headscarf and a dirty apron with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth was ill-naturedly serving weak, undrinkable coffee, and they gazed at her and her undrinkable coffee with grateful and mute joy, even when she tried to charge them a shilling and demanded ration books they did not possess. The major from the Durhams had a car and driver waiting for him and was whisked away. The rest of them hitched a lift into the town in the back of an army truck. The cold sliced through their thin desert fatigues like a thousand unceasing pinpricks, numbing and painful at the same time, and they shivered, hugging themselves, teeth chattering uncontrollably as the open truck lurched through country lanes and onto a main road. It hurt to open one’s eyes to the wind and the frozen air.
As they reached the outskirts of the town Gerald saw bombed buildings, whole rows of houses gone, in street after street, deep craters everywhere. The people were pale and gaunt, jumping over puddles and bomb debris, huddled in layer upon layer and hurrying as though they feared being caught outside. They seemed like a crowd in a wilderness.
The truck dropped them at the railway station and, seeing a public telephone, Gerald had the wild idea of telephoning Diana. It was dark but the day had begun, Diana would be at home. The telephone on the table in the hallway would ring. She would come to the phone, pulling on a dressing-gown, perhaps with Abigail in her arms, and pick up the receiver expecting—
Here his imagination stalled. For what would he say? Hello, old girl, it’s me. I’m back. Dear God. It was dreadful. He baulked at the stilted blandness of his words but no others presented themselves. And in the end it did not matter, for the girl at the exchange laughed humourlessly and said there were no lines available and didn’t he know there was a war on? and promptly disconnected him.
They boarded the next London train, finding space where they could in the corridor or standing. Fields and villages and lanes rushed past the window. England, it appeared, had changed out of all recognition and at the same time had not changed at all, and Gerald felt himself take pleasure in the tumble-down farm buildings, the canals, the frost on the ground, the bare branches of the trees.
Now I am on my way!
The train stopped and started again and was shunted into sidings to allow other trains to pass, it was rerouted and diverted and finally terminated altogether at Clapham Junction, which was not even on the Exeter to London line, but the line ahead was closed due to a bomb and they all disembarked.
It was late afternoon, around four. The day, such as it had been, had gone, and as Gerald stood on the platform with his kitbag the darkening evening air came at him through his ears and his mouth and his nose and even his eyes and he could not think.
There would be no more trains that day. They would have to continue their journey by bus or Underground. People drifted away, uncomplaining, numbed to discomfort, to unfulfilled expectations. Gerald could see none of his fellow Cairo travellers; they had melted away like the day itself, and any camaraderie that may have built up over the long and fraught journey had melted away with it. He left the station and found, outside, another public telephone and this one had a directory in it. He went into the box and closed the door behind him, enjoying the relative warmth that the enclosed space momentarily afforded him, and repelled by the long-forgotten smell of phone-box stale cigarettes and piss. He fingers went to the ‘A’s and he found Ashby’s wife at 38 Commongate Road, Clapham. For Ashby had lived here, in Clapham, and of all the places he might have been stranded, fate had seen fit to dump him here, in Ashby’s backyard. It was a penance for his survival, for his being spared while Ashby was taken. It must be done; why not now? God knew when he might find himself down here again.
He did not bother to try to telephone—the humourless laughter of the girl at the exchange in Exeter still sounded in his ear—but set off south and east towards the Common in the direction provided by a helpful clerk in the booking office.
There were Americans everywhere. He had not expected that. It seemed as though every uniform was that of a GI, every voice he heard an American one. They were fresh-faced and handsome, tall and lean and strong and smiling. He resented that. And so many civilians, hurrying home. Not one of them cast him a second glance, or if they did it was his deeply suntanned face that they saw, a visible sign that he had just returned from foreign parts, that he had just gone through a war in the desert.
Or did they think he had been on a long holiday on the Riviera?
No, they thought nothing, they turned away at once if they saw him at all. There was a barrier around him that they could not see and that Gerald was only dimly becoming aware of but it was swelling around him, intensifying, with each step he took among them. He very soon began to hate the civilians even more than he resented the Americans. He wished only to be among other military men.
His eyes had adjusted quickly to the blackout so that he found the road easily enough. Pale moonlight showed him elegant late-Victorian villas on the north side of the road and the south side bordered the Common, a void that stretched away into the night, impenetrable and uninviting, and Gerald felt a longing for the desert so strong it took his breath away.
This was not how he’d imagined his homecoming.
Number 38 was a double-fronted four-storey establishment with bay windows and a small paved area at the front from which white-painted steps led up to a raised entranceway and a lead-lighted front door. A decorative lantern hanging above the door was unlit. The windows were black, as were all the windows the entire length of the street, and he only knew it was the right house because he had counted and now shone a tiny torch at the brass numbers on the gatepost. He had not given a thought to what he was going to say but little could be achieved by his remaining on the doorstep, so he rang the bell and waited. It seemed a vain and rather shameful hope that no one would be in, he knew Mrs Ashby would be in, and when he heard footsteps in the hallway he was not even surprised. Just for a second Ashby appeared, startlingly clear, before him and Gerald uttered a few silent words to him, part in prayer, part in apology.
The front door was cautiously opened and light from a distant room seeped out so that the blackout was compromised. Gerald saw a woman silhouetted in the doorway, a matronly figure with hair tied up in a bun and a girth that filled the doorway; he saw a tight-fitting functional dress and swollen ankles above feet wedged into too-tight formal shoes. This could not be Ashby’s wife. He had come to the wrong house.
The woman peered at him, and he could tell from the jerk of her head, her silence, that she took in his uniform, his kitbag. It was too dark for her to see his face.
‘I’m so sorry to bother you,’ said Gerald, and his voice sounded absurd, somehow. ‘I’m looking for—is this the house of Mrs Ashby?’ It was. He knew it by the way she lifted her chin, suspicion replaced by surprise, curiosity. ‘My name is Meadows. I was a friend of Captain Ashby. I just wanted to—’
He stopped. He wanted very much for this woman to interrupt him, to announce that, unfortunately, Mrs Ashby was out. That Mrs Ashby no longer lived here. That Mrs Ashby had taken her child and gone to live with relatives in Bristol for the duration. But instead she said, ‘Please wait here,’ and went back inside, closing the door but reopening it almost at once and saying, ‘Won’t you please come in, Mr Meadows?’
He followed her down a short, ill-lit but graceful hallway with a parquetry floor that smelled of wax furniture polish and potpourri and something indistinguishable but distinctively comforting and familiar, the smell of English houses filled with old furniture and thick carpets and flocked William Morris wallpaper and burning coal fires. And disconcertingly the hallway banked suddenly so that he reached out a hand to steady himself. It had happened periodically throughout the day as his body readjusted itself to the solid ground after the day spent in the aircraft, but he wished that the woman, who had paused outside a doorway, had not witnessed this. Her face gave nothing away and she stood aside to let him pass.
He found himself in a large and comfortable living room carpeted in dark green pile and wallpapered with some kind of roses design, heavy velvet curtains at the window and mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite reproductions on the wall. Crowded bookshelves, glass-fronted cabinets of chinaware and a chintz settee with two matching armchairs made up the bulk of the furniture. A beautiful original marble fireplace filled one wall with coals glowing hotly, a coal scuttle and tongs on the hearth before it. It was all so very, very English and Gerald smiled helplessly to see it.
Mrs Ashby was seated on the settee, perched on its edge, her legs crossed at the ankles, hands placed, one over the other, on her knee. It was her feet he saw first, black shoes, slender ankles, dark stockings, a charcoal grey skirt, a pinkish or mauve blouse with a bow at the collar and a black collarless woollen jacket of some sort, fitted and well cut. She sat very upright, and in the soft light of the lampshade and the flickering light from the coals one side of her neck was bathed red, the other side was in shadow. Even so, Gerald knew her, had seen her photograph and would have recognised her at once. The photograph Ashby had had was a studio shot, carefully staged, a woman swathed in furs, artfully made up and glancing at the camera with a still, serene face devoid of expression. Quite, quite beautiful yet utterly devoid of expression—and that was how she appeared to him now. She observed him as though she was that photograph brought to life, her face perfectly symmetrical, her mouth and eyes unmoving so that he had no sense of her at all, could not tell even if she wore make-up or not. A woman made of porcelain, perfect and flawless—and utterly breakable. For now he saw it, a flush of colour on both cheeks that might have been heat from the fire but he knew was not. She rose in one fluid movement, uncrossing her legs, standing up, holding out one hand, the other hand falling to her side, her eyes never leaving his face.
‘Captain Meadows,’ she said in a deep, clear voice, taking his hand as though she had been expecting him. ‘Please sit down. Mrs Woodcock, would you be a dear and bring tea and cake?’
The utter conventionality of her words struck him mute and Gerald sat, at a loss where to put his kitbag, handing it finally to the waiting Mrs Woodcock. Mrs Ashby sat down again, exactly as she had been sitting before, and without realising it he mimicked her, sitting on the edge of the sofa, turned slightly towards her, hands on his knees. And all the while her face did not move. There was an intensity about her, held rigidly in check, and at the same time a languidness that defied—and denied—all feeling. Or did he imagine that intensity? Either way, he could not take his eyes from it, for the only women he had seen in three years had been the Syrian, Moroccan, Egyptian girls outside the brothels or the occasional WAC, twenty years his junior, gauche and giggling, swapping lipsticks like schoolgirls. Mrs Ashby was another thing altogether: a woman in her later thirties with all the poise and sophistication, the serenity and elegance that her age conferred on her but none of the petty anxiety and faded beauty of a woman past her prime.
‘So kind of you to visit us,’ she said. ‘Christopher mentioned you often in his letters.’
For a moment Gerald had no idea to whom she was referring. Ashby, of course, whom he had never, in all that time, called by his first name.
‘I wanted to pay my respects, Mrs Ashby. Your husband and I were in the same unit for a couple of years,’ he heard himself saying. ‘We went through it all. Together. We—’ He stopped. It was not what he wanted to say, but what did he want to say? Something momentous, something fitting. Something worthy of Ashby, of Ashby’s death. Ashby’s tank had been hit by a shell and Ashby had been incinerated at the start of the battle in the Western Desert. He hoped she already knew this or did not wish to know these details, for he doubted he could relate them to her in this room, seated on the chintz settee with the Pre-Raphaelites on the wall.
But she did not ask. Instead she smiled, though her face did not move. Her eyes told him nothing. Where was she? It was as though he was making conversation with a stranger on a train. His presence seemed to make no impression on her.
The woman, Mrs Woodcock, came in pushing a trolley and they both watched her as she served tea in two bone china teacups and two very small slices of some indeterminate cake on little plates.
‘Thank you, Mrs Woodcock,’ Mrs Ashby said. ‘Would you ask Marcus to come down?’
And when the woman had gone Gerald said, ‘I hope you don’t think me rude, turning up unannounced like this?’ He searched her face to find some indication that she was put out or grateful—or something.
‘Not at all. It’s so very kind of you to bother about us.’
Her words cut him painfully because they were so horribly bland and meaningless and because, truth be told, he had not wanted to come here at all—as surely she must know—and now that he was here, he felt lost, somehow, in her presence. Did she see that?
A little boy appeared in the doorway. He was about four, dressed in too-large pink-and-white striped pyjamas and a dressing-gown that was tied around his middle. He had Ashby’s hair, dark and wavy, and Ashby’s ears, neat and small and flat against his head, but his mother’s nose and eyes and mouth—watchful eyes, a delicate nose, slightly aristocratic, a wide mouth with narrow lips. The boy took in the tall, strange-smelling uniformed stranger and ran to his mother, wrapping his arms around her knees, burying his head in her lap.
And she gave the boy the same unsmiling smile, not moving other than to fold her arms around his small shoulders. She seemed to look over her little boy’s head at the opposite wall, at something the rest of them could not see. ‘Marcus, come along,’ she murmured, stroking his head. ‘Don’t be shy. Say hello to Captain Meadows. He has travelled a long way to visit us.’
He had travelled a long way, but if his train had not terminated at Clapham he would not have come. Gerald watched them both wretchedly. The boy lifted his head and peered shyly, twisting his body as though he did not want the stranger to see him, or did not quite know what to do with it. ‘Hullo, there, old man,’ said Gerald and hated himself.
Mrs Ashby had not touched her tiny slice of cake and now she pushed it towards her little boy and he gobbled it up and Gerald thought, There is rationing here, I had forgotten, and he passed his own slice to the boy too, though he was aching with hunger. He drank the tea, which was almost black, a few flakes of dried milk floating on its surface.
‘How long is your leave, Captain Meadows?’ she said.
‘No idea,’ he said truthfully, as no one had told him. ‘Not long, I expect. Once the paperwork catches up to me no doubt they’ll ship me off again.’
‘And have you a family of your own?’
‘A wife and a little girl. In Buckinghamshire. I am on my way there now.’
She smiled but made no reply and Ashby filled the space between them with his absence.
The little boy stared at Gerald, picking at the crumbs on his plate and staring and staring.
‘You’re just like him, old man,’ said Gerald, because the boy’s stare was unnerving him and because, at that moment, Marcus was just like his dead father. Horribly, Gerald felt his own eyes fill with tears.
Of course they both saw it, the little boy and her, Mrs Ashby, and Gerald saw the muscles go rigid beneath the skin on her face as her mask slipped for one dreadful moment then it was back and she smiled at him and said, ‘More tea, Captain Meadows?’
He did not want more tea but accepted with a nod and he knew the child saw through his politeness and despised him. But it allowed them both a minute of silence as she, his mother, carefully stirred the teapot, poured a small amount into Gerald’s cup and offered him a spoonful of the dreadful dried milk, and her calmness, her poise, was devastating and magnificent now that he had seen the mask slip for that one vital moment. He wanted to reach over and fold her in his arms as she had enfolded the boy, to take her hand and hold it in his. He felt this need filling him up and filling the room as, a short while ago, Ashby had filled it.
‘Ashby—Christopher—spoke of you often,’ he said desperately.
Ashby had spoken of her hardly at all. It was not what one did on the eve of battle, in the mess, under a tarpaulin in the desert, on the terrace of a hotel in Cairo. One talked about tanks and munitions and the other officers and the CO and the mosquitos and the flies and the dysentery.
‘Did he?’ she replied, almost wistfully, and he saw that she knew he was lying. Why had he even said such a thing? But he had needed to bring Ashby back into the room. ‘May I get you another slice of cake?’ she said. ‘Not that we have any, but it’s conventional to offer, isn’t it?’ And before he could think of a reply, ‘It’s this damned war,’ she said, uttering the usual cliché but dully, as though it had ceased to hold any meaning. Gerald wondered if she was referring to the lack of cake or the death of her husband.
After half an hour he got up to go; any sooner would have looked improper. She stood up at once the way someone does when they have been waiting for you to leave, but when she stood by the door and held his hand she exclaimed, ‘Oh, you poor man! How cold your hands are!’ and disappeared into a cupboard. When she reappeared she was holding two big thick sheepskin gloves and she took each of his hands and placed the gloves on him one by one, the way a wife might do for her husband. Gerald realised they were Ashby’s gloves.
‘We won’t need them,’ she said simply, as though he had spoken out loud.
He escaped with Ashby’s gloves on his hands, fleeing the house, fleeing the woman, who was Ashby’s widow, and her son, who was Ashby’s little boy, bumbling his way in the blackout, not knowing where he was going or in which direction. Her calmness and her poise followed him, no matter which way he turned.
It was raining. The coldness of the rain shocked him into stopping and lifting his face to the rain till it was wet. He must get home. The delay seemed suddenly intolerable.
He found himself on a main road with a bus stop, where he waited, without hope, for a bus. When one came, he got on and an hour later was disgorged into the busy, choking melee around Victoria Station. It was a test, the visit to Mrs Ashby, some complicated test that he had somehow failed, though he could not put his finger on how, but now that he was away from the woman and her son, as every step put time and miles between him and them, the fact of his failure receded.
He walked north from Victoria, a part of, yet separate from, the melee, colliding with lampposts and other people, stumbling into craters and over bomb debris, making his way doggedly across the city that was his home and was as alien as the surface of the moon. And when he reached Baker Street Underground station it was closed due to the bombing, and when he went, instead, to Marylebone that was closed too and he was forced to give up and find a hotel—a wretched place off Dorset Square frequented by callgirls and Polish and Czech officers—where he put up for the night.
My first night back on English soil, he thought later, as he sat on the bed in shirt sleeves and listened to the pipes knocking behind the walls and the couple in the next room copulating. It was tawdry. Bleak, rundown, mean-spirited, inhospitable, unwelcoming. They had had it bad in London, of course he knew that, but the reality of it was . . . shocking. He pictured his home, so tantalisingly close now, but somehow as distant as victory had seemed in 1940. He pictured Diana in her Sunday coat and gloves after church, arranging flowers on the dining room table, turning to look at him, the secateurs in her hand, a look of calm contentment on her face; but he could not quite see her face, could only see Mrs Ashby’s face, unsmiling and smiling at the same time.
He didn’t want to lie down on the greasy pillow or beneath the sheets and the thin blanket, but in the end exhaustion overcame him and he wrapped himself in the blanket and pulled his cap low over his ears and slept.
He awoke with a start before dawn and for a disorientating moment was utterly lost. It was cold, numbingly cold, and when he struck a match in the grey light he saw his breath hanging in the air, he saw the ice on the inside of the hotel window. Gathering his things, he left at once, hurrying through the fading darkness to the station, catching the first Metropolitan Line train north, having a compartment to himself, and reaching Amersham an hour later. There he hitched a lift on a milk cart. Dawn had come, sluggishly and reluctantly, during his train journey, and when the milk cart dropped him on the Amersham Road his footsteps crunched in the frost.
Why had they chosen to live somewhere so damnably difficult to get to? he wondered as he walked briskly down the hill in the chilly early morning air. But it had seemed charming, he remembered, motoring up from Middlesex one late summer afternoon in 1930 and seeing a village barely touched by the modern world with straw on the ground and horse-drawn carts in the street. They had found a village green lined with gabled red-brick houses overlooked by a medieval church tower, the church at the end of an ancient bricked lane, entered via a crazy Tudor archway. They had found a bridge over a stream and a pond bordered by willows and filled with ducks. They had found happiness here, even if they had failed to find a railway anywhere nearby.
Gerald crossed the bridge over the stream and saw that the pond had been drained. A large mallard waddled over in search of food. He saw that all the ducks were watching him, standing stock-still, as though waiting to see what he would do. He walked past them. People were about now—no cars, of course, due to the petrol ration, but on foot or horseback, men and women in working clothes making their way silently in the cold morning to the bus stop, the shop, the farm. Horse-drawn traps and carts, long abandoned, had been unearthed and put to work so that one could almost imagine the village had slipped back into the previous century were it not for the sandbags and stirrup pumps at every front door, the blackout curtains and the tape on every window. One or two people looked at him, frowning, wondering who he was perhaps, but no one passed close enough to recognise him and he was glad of that, for he had a sudden dread of being impeded, now, this close to home.
He left the main street and turned south into Milton Crescent, just as he had done every day for ten years on his return from his office, but he had never returned home in such turmoil, with his heart thudding in his chest and his head booming with some inner pulse that made it feel like he was in battle. He found he was staring at his boots as he walked, afraid to look up. He made himself look up. Yes, see! It had not changed, not much—despite the sandbags and stirrup pumps, the blackout curtains, the taped windows—and his sense of a previous century faded, for Milton Crescent was a between-the-wars development. Two rows of sprawling, mock-Tudor houses led up the hill away from the high street and into the fields that surrounded the village. The road veered sharply to the left two-thirds of the way along, almost curving back on itself. Their house, The Larches, was on the west side of the street, right on the apex of the curve, which provided a wonderful view from the front rooms looking back down the entire length of the street to the medieval tower of the parish church, with the rear of the house surrounded by fields. It was this double vista that had prompted them to take this house and they had enjoyed almost ten glorious years until the fields behind the house had been slated for development. Then the war had come. He could see the fields now and they stood fallow and untouched, exactly as they had been on the morning he had left.
His footsteps crunched on the gravel but fallen autumn leaves that had never been swept away and had turned to mulch soon dulled the sound. The clematis by the front door had grown monstrously, all but obscuring the door. The blackout curtains were drawn. Even now, this close, he hesitated. He wanted Diana to see him but the blackout prevented that. He wanted the front door to be flung open and her to run out, blindly, into his arms.
The front door did not open. So he walked up and knocked, like a stranger might, not using his key. He waited. He knocked a second time, louder.
‘Mr Meadows! It is, isn’t it? I saw you come up the hill but I couldn’t be sure.’
It was Mrs Probart who lived next door and who was standing now at the entrance to her driveway. They had been neighbours for ten years yet he had utterly forgotten her existence. She stood now in a pair of outsized men’s wellingtons and a big winter coat, blinking at the weak winter sunlight and he summoned a smile. ‘It is. Hullo, Mrs Probart. How are you?’ he said, feeling a sort of pounding impatience overcome him. He did not want Mrs Probart to be the first person he met, to be the woman to welcome him home.
But she was peering at him curiously now. Coming up the drive and peering at him. ‘But surely you know Mrs Meadows isn’t here?’ she said, and for a moment he did not understand her. He remembered that Mrs Probart’s husband had died many years ago, in a farming accident, that she had a number of grandchildren somewhere. Leamington Spa, was it?
‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’ he said.
‘Mrs Meadows dropped in to say goodbye about a week ago. It was quite out of the blue—well, to me, anyway. She said she was taking Abigail away. She felt it wasn’t safe here. Not with the bombs. Though I must say we’ve not had it at all out here. But she was anxious. She’d had a bad time of it in London, got caught in a raid, and that decided it for her, I suppose. Anyway, she left that morning—but surely you knew?’